Friday Featured Artist: Gayle Forman

I first saw Gayle Forman’s work at a pop up exhibit, T/here. Bathroom Vacations and DIY Norfolk were being exhibited on a postcard rack. You could purchase one for $0.25. It peaked my interest because I grew up in Virginia Beach, where tourism dominates the city’s economy. I wanted to get to know their take on the economics of art.

As it turns out, Forman’s drive in her art making is in the giving. Their work explores opportunities for participation and how to give back to their audience. Forman (above) wants you to be able to experience their work, and take something from it.

We met and spoke about how they develop their ideas, talked about their inspirations, and how much fun they have making it all happen.

AltDaily: The studio is a good place to find community.

Gayle Forman: Yes it is… everyone is enriched and involved. That’s one of the original things that drew me to glass. The fact that it was a people environment. You can’t lock yourself in the studio. You have to work with people.

What artists inspire you?

I’m fascinated with this artist the works collaboratively with her husband, Lucy Orta, especially her early work. I have an ongoing list! {Takes out sketchbook.}

I do a lot of writing. For some reason sketching doesn’t come naturally to me. I like transparency paper so sometimes I am all about the fold outs.

This is for a project called Fountain Drinks. I’m not sure I’ve finished it. There’s a cabinet and I created glass stemware that’s specifically engineered to be a fountain. This is my research in stemware, looking at everything from the simple to the ornate.

How much time do you spend in your sketchbook?

In school you use it a lot because you’re always trying to work through ideas because you have an assignment. It only comes out when I start a project [and] I’m trying to work through an idea. I’m kind of horrible at keeping up with it actually.

What do you research? I saw your drawing of a swing.

Situationists, Gutai, Fluxus artists, Dada, Surrealism comes into play, I’m interested in the absurd, magical realism, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short stories, and some of Borge’s short stories. I actually carry around “On Exactitude.” It’s about the making of a map. The cartographers want to get it so exact it ends up being as large as the city itself. And that’s completely ridiculous — it’s a map as big as the city it’s suppose to be representing.

Tell me about The Glassblower’s Playground.

We went to Czech Republic to look at the glass factories and studios, and it was at one of the factories that I was struck with the realization that glass factories are just fancy playgrounds for glass. There were really amazing moments where the glass was between machines or steps in the process and it would be airborne, or flip around. Even in the basement with the waste glass there was a large slide that wads of hot glass would slide down and splash into a large turning water basin and make incredible sounds.

I just kept seeing these moments and loving that it was happening within the confines of some really efficient production. People were there operating the machines but they weren’t doing any of the movement themselves, whereas in my relationship with glass–I am trying to control the gravity and motion, so seeing this completely mechanized environment where glass is still finding these strange moments to flip around and swing–I just got really excited about it.

When I came back I wanted to start figuring out how those things really combine. My interest in the playground and it being an environment where… as kids you know how to use a swing, you figure out how to go down a slide, you understand gravity, velocity and tension without having to know the science behind them. I was also realizing that for all of the times you use playground equipment exactly how it is designed, there are also so many times that you make fake games with friends and you imagine the slide as a castle wall or something, and the equipment becomes something else. I was curious about the environment of the playground and the environment of the glass shop. Anyone that goes into the glass shop the first thing they do is learn how you fit your body around all the equipment. So I just thought that was very similar. And seeing glass being playful in an environment like a production factory, I wanted it to feel as playful in a place that was even more experimental. I am still working through these parallels and I envision there’s a lot more parallels… this piece isn’t exactly realized. I’m thinking it might eventually exist as a performance.

You’ll need your team on the swing too.

Yes. Sometimes as an artist you need to take that first swing, so to speak, and just make something to get the idea flowing. So I made the swing because it was sort of the icon of a playground to me. I made a video of it. I took a photo of it. I exhibited it as it is. And none of those three ways were as satisfying to me as actually being on the swing. It just seems that the video was sort of lackluster, and I hadn’t mastered what to make on the swing. Would I just make bubbles, What would I do? There was that technical challenge.

I think it’s most exciting when you can sit and watch it. It’s part of the reason I was super interested in even coming to the Chrysler Museum of Art Glass Studio because of its focus on performance glass and the opportunity to bring ideas that are not sculpture or objects to put on a pedestal to the stage. Eventually I’d like to create performance that culminates that research on glass and playground and humans and play.

There’s an artist, Carston Holler, that I look at a lot. He makes all these slides in the middle of museums. He takes this play environment straight to the galleries. There’s a swing he set up right on the rooftop edge of a building and it’s stuff like that that plays between playful and sort of dangerous. He did a big one at the Tate that went all the way through the museum. It’s interesting that simply by using icons everyone recognizes what sort of environment you are in, that just by putting a slide somewhere people understand how they are supposed to act. They’re entering that playful space, and they think, oh I understand what this is. This is again, why I decided playground was essential…

Your work reminds me a lot of simulacrums. I like that.

This also comes from not being satisfied with my ability to perfectly represent things with my hand — like, with drawing. So, I’ve had to figure out ways of representation. With that comes a sort of inauthenticity, like with photos, where I can set the stage. I like the idea of making something with what you have. All those bathroom images were about wanting to travel wherever at any time, but also the reality of being completely bound by means and responsibility. Also being a little overwhelmed with the combination of having a ton of stuff living in a one bedroom apartment, and so this sort of solved a storage problem for me. If I used all of my tan and beige clothes to make sand for my bathroom beach, I didn’t have to stuff them into an already overflowing dresser. It was sort of a 2-in-1.

Do you have any pieces planned for this summer?

🙂

***

This summer, Forman will recreate their piece, 1 in 10,000, pictured above. They created it so people can take a four leaf clover with them as they part ways with it. On their website, they wrote this about 1 in 10,000:

Museums promise knowledge or beauty within their walls for the public to find. I see it in the same way I see throwing a coin into a wishing well, or searching for a four-leaf clover for luck. The person throwing or searching is trying to find some sign, symbol, or, in a museum’s case, artwork that suddenly makes their universe understandable. That leaves me with the question: how important is the quest for [luck, knowledge, beauty] in the eventual obtaining of these things? I want to give luck in the same way museums give beauty. Should this fountain flourish, it will provide guaranteed luck to those who wish to take it.

In this new rendition of the artwork, they’ll be traveling around “like a traveling salesman” with a shopping cart. They’ll be taking this piece to the streets so you can “come and get your luck.” Keep your eyes peeled this summer!

Christine Marie Rucker is an artist and instructor. She is the founder and Director of QbyQ Press, a small independent publisher. QbyQ Press seeks to foster creative connections and growth through collaborative bookmaking. Christine attends Goddard College’s Master of Arts in Expressive Arts Therapy. She currently teaches at the Governor’s School for the Arts, Norfolk City Jail, and The Muse Writer’s Center. Her artwork has been shown at CultureFix Gallery, Governor’s Island Art Fair, Shea Stadium, other places in New York City and Hampton Roads area.